" The Economy "

Many of you may be wondering why the country is in such a poor economic state. You may be operating under the assumption that this is just another temporary recession and that we will inevitably bounce back. There is no logical reason for such optimism . Anyone in business today knows how hard it is to bear the regulation, taxation, legal risks and so on ---but few people know that bad philosophy is at the root of it all .

Doug this is not a recession it is a Depression. Coming back but until we change the current socialistic administration and get back to capitalistic, free enteprise we are in trouble, at least we business people are in trouble.

buda Wrote:
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> Doug this is not a recession it is a Depression.
> Coming back but until we change the current
> socialistic administration and get back to
> capitalistic, free enteprise we are in trouble, at
> least we business people are in trouble.

Yeah,Really It is depression,almost all people get shortcomings of it.

buda Wrote:
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> Doug this is not a recession it is a Depression.
> Coming back but until we change the current
> socialistic administration and get back to
> capitalistic, free enteprise we are in trouble, at
> least we business people are in trouble.

I agree completely with you bud, we have to chnage the current and get back in regaining the capital.

Glad to see that others understand the serious threat to our country . Still, I was hoping to spark some discussion of the book, " Atlas Shrugged " ( Part II of the movie is coming soon BTW ) and Ayn Rand's moral defense of capitalism . Here are some quotes to think over :

" Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God . Man's mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man's standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith . Man's standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society , whose standards are beyond man's right of judgement and must be accepted as a primary absolute. The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question .
His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth--to his great-grandchildren . "

- John Galt- P.1027 Atlas Shrugged

ATLAS SHRUGGED Quote

P. 1027 : " The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive-a definition that invalidates man's conciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society-a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a superbeing embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself . "

-John Galt-

"....They're eating us alive, and it's no use fooling anybody about how it's the rich they're after--do you know what's happening to us ? "

...." Whose job is it to offer an alternative ? Who provides a country with ideas, with knowledge, with political theories ? The intellectuals, but it is the intellectuals who have brought us to this state and are deserting under fire at a time when they are needed most ....

...." Nothing but an undifferentiated mob of trembling statists who haggle only over how fast or how slow we are to collapse into a totalitarian dictatorship . "

" The guilt of the liberals in the 19th century was that they never discovered capitalism and they have not discovered it to this day . "

" The fundamental principle of capitalism is the separation of state and economics ; that is, the liberation of man's economic actions of production and trade from any form of compulsion, regulation, coercion and control. "

...."Every dollar the government spends is taken out of the citizens'
pockets, whether it is taken by theft (taxation) or fraud
(inflation). Government borrowing is backed by the taxing
power and diverts capital from production to the consumption
of those getting the government's borrowed dollars.

Even if the income tax were abolished, if spending remained
unchanged, nothing fundamental would be changed. In fact, it
might be worse, due to the implied horrific inflation.

-Harry Binswanger-

" Without property rights, no other rights are possible. "

"...if civilization is to survive, it is the Altruist morality that we have to reject. "

" Capitalism is not the system of the past. It is the system of the future if mankind is to have a future. "

Profile :
I looked at Wikipedia's article on Wilson. I get the impression that he mixes fact and fiction, mysticism and reason to put the reader into a confused state that will make the reader think creatively . This doesn't sound good to me because most people's minds are muddled enough already . Until I read some of his work for myself, I will reserve final judgement .

If one is going to question and find knowlege one must first have the basic philosophical principles that Ayn Rand provides . Otherwise, seeking to know the world will be like examining a fine painting without knowing which side of the canvas to look at .
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More quotes :
" What were they thinking now, the champions of need and the lechers of pity ?--she wondered. What were they counting on ? Those who had once simpered, " I don't want to destroy the rich, I only want to seize a little of their surplus to help the poor, just a little, they'll never miss it ! "

P.915 Atlas Shrugged ( thoughts of Dagny Taggart )

nervous woman : " Senor D'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world ? "

Francisco D'Anconia : " Just exactly what it deserves ".

nervous woman : " Oh, how cruel " !

- Atlas Shrugged P. 410-
" You don't have to worry about the intellectuals, Wesley, just put a few of them on the government payroll and send them out to preach precisely the sort of thing Mr. Kinnon mentioned : that the blame rests on the victims . "
- Dr. Ferris- P. 547, Atlas Shrugged
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The following is from www.aynrand.org :

Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” Named One of 88 “Books That Shaped America”

Fifty-Five Years after Publication,
Rand’s Novel Recognized by Library of Congress

IRVINE, Calif.—Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” has been named one of 88 “Books That Shaped America” by the Library of Congress, placing it among other notable works, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Fahrenheit 451.” Rand’s novel, her magnum opus, was published in 1957 and hit the bestseller list that same year. Last year alone, “Atlas Shrugged” sold more than 400,000 copies.

Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, said people may be drawn to the book because of its relevance to the current political and economic culture.

“President Obama’s recent ‘you didn’t build that’ remarks could have been uttered by any of the villains in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” said Brook. “The parallels that can be drawn between events in the book and today’s culture are becoming more and more pronounced.”

“Atlas Shrugged” is both a mystery and a love story following the decline of a fictional world’s economy and the people who attempt to save it. The novel embodies Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, and examines the role of the mind in man’s existence.

“Many credit Rand for predicting the political events we’re seeing today in America,” said Brook. “While Rand herself said ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was not written as a prediction, more and more people are looking to the book as a way to find answers to their current situations.”
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"In the war between individualism and collectivism, we just reached a climax. Obama has openly denied individual achievement, spitting in the face of every individual who ever had a creative thought. Obama has ventured to say straight out what only the theoreticians of collectivism have scribbled before: there is no individual achievement. "You did not build" what you built. What appears to be your achievement is somehow the achievement of the collective--especially its representative on earth: the government."

-Harry Binswanger-

“Ayn Rand is history’s preeminent champion of capitalism. Who else had the courage to say that free markets are not simply powerful engines of wealth creation, but one-hundred percent moral—moral because they free the individual to pursue his own goals, wealth, and happiness?

“Instead of apologizing for opposing America’s colossal regulatory-entitlement state, the way virtually all Republicans do, Rand unflinchingly identified it as a moral corruption that sacrifices the individual to the collective. She didn’t seek to reform it but to end it.

“Ryan was right when he said that ‘Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining . . . the morality of individualism.’ But what he and the rest of us must learn is individualism’s full meaning. According to this distinctively American idea, the government’s only function is to protect the freedom of every individual. Nothing short of this principle will end the unlimited power that Big Government now wields over our lives.”
-Dan Watkins-

" Atlas gives the American spirit a philosophic defense it has never had. The American spirit often has been attacked as atomistic, cruel, and materialistic. Atlas blasts any such notion. It shows that capitalism is a win-win system where all individuals are free to pursue their happiness. It shows that it is right for individuals to be concerned with their own happiness. And it shows that those who seek to "tread on you" – to control your life, redistribute your wealth, and mortgage your future – are morally wrong. "
-Dan Watkins-
" Objectivism is the first fully developed philosophical repudiation of religion in human history . "
-John Ridpath-

" I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion . "
-Ayn Rand at age 29-
"Obama seems to borrowing his speeches from the villains of Atlas Shrugged:

"Genius is a superstition, Jim," said Dr. Ferris slowly, with an odd kind of emphasis, as if knowing that he was naming the unnamed in all their minds.

"There's no such thing as the intellect. A man's brain is a social product. A sum of influences that he's picked up from those around him. Nobody invents anything, he merely reflects what's floating in the social atmosphere. A genius is an intellectual scavenger and a greedy hoarder of the ideas which rightfully belong to society, from which he stole them. All thought is theft."

And consider this exchange between Cherryl and Taggart.

"Mr. Taggart, what is it that makes you so unhappy?" "Why should you care whether I am or not?" "Because--well, if you haven't the right to be happy and proud, who has?"

"That's what I want to know--who has?" He turned to her abruptly, the words exploding as if a safety fuse had blown. "He didn't invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?"....

....The whole purpose of "You did not build it" is to equate people, to drag down the great to the level of the average or sub-average. But if that were true, it would mean any corner lout could be yanked off the street, plunked down at a desk or at a lab bench and do what the great entrepreneurs, scientists, and inventors have done. The only reason Joe Sixpack didn't find the Higgs boson is that he didn't happen to be provided with a hadron collider. The bully from your sixth grade didn't happen to write Atlas Shrugged because . . . well things just didn't flow that way.

If we were all equal, there would be no need to say we are all equal. That would be one of the facts that every equal person would already know. Because no one would build knowledge, individual knowledge held apart from the collective. "
- Harry Binswanger-
From : America's Persecuted Minority : Big Business, lecture, 11/17/61

" Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers . In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie ; in NAZI Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen . "

" A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoretitians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power . "

" Let me repeat it : a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force . "

" The nature of governmental action is : coercive action . "

" The only proper function of a government in a free country is to act as an agency which protects the individual's rights , i.e., which protects the individual from physical violence . "

" A proper government has the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. "

" A statist is a man who believes that some men have the right to force, coerce, endslave, rob, and murder others. "

" What is economic power ? It is the power to produce and to trade what one has produced . "

" In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined--not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone's "greed" or by anyone's need--but by the law of supply and demand . "

" A system of pure , unregulated laissez-faire capitalism has never yet existed anywhere. "

" All of the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to the businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy . "
-Ayn Rand 1961-

Here's an excerpt from a Harry Binswanger column on the economy from Forbes online :
....But focusing on the deficit is a disastrous error. The deficit is only a difference between two numbers: what the government spends vs. what it extracts in taxation. It is spending that is the real issue, not the difference between spending and anything else.

You have doubts? What if the deficit remained at its present level of about $1.4 trillion, but spending dropped to–let’s make this interesting–$1.4 trillion. All of government would be financed by deficit-spending. And what would be the result? You’d pay no taxes. Businesses would pay no taxes. Nothing, zero, zilch. Can you imagine what that would do for the economy? For the stock market? For the housing market? How does the “problem of the deficit” stack up against that fantasy-vision of skyrocketing economic progress, and you keeping all your earnings?

Of course, those numbers are only for making the point. Spending couldn’t suddenly be cut from $4 trillion to $1.4 trillion. But spending could be cut to $3.5 trillion without raising a sweat–spending was at that level in 2009. What if that cut left the deficit unaffected? It would still be a godsend. It would mean taxes would go down, dollar for dollar, with spending cuts, while leaving borrowing and inflation unchanged. The average tax bill would go down by $5,600 a year if the cuts were in income taxes. Could you use $5,600 more a year? And, mind you, government would still be operating with the funds it had in 2009.

Now look at the reverse situation. Imagine we eliminated the deficit entirely but in the process doubled spending. Spending goes to $8 trillion and taxation (somehow) extracts all $8 trillion. No budget deficit, but economic disaster–personally and on the macro-level. (That’s another way of saying that it is just impossible to fix the deficit by leaving spending unchanged and raising taxes to cover it, since the higher taxes kill growth. Thank you, Arthur Laffer.)

Conclusion? The three things that matter most are: spending, spending, and spending.

“Spending” is the government’s “take,” the wealth sucked out of the private sector–i.e., out of your pocket. What the government giveth, the government hath taken away. Behind the veil of money, everything that the government “spends” is actually goods and services taken out of private hands–in fact, taken away from its rightful owners. And did I mention? Taken by force.

“Spending” is a euphemism. The actual term is “looting.”

What counts is not the form in which the loot is seized–taxation or borrowing or the printing-press–but the magnitude of the looting.

While we are all being suckered into looking at the difference between being looted this way or that, the amount of loot taken from us goes on rising relentlessly, year after year.

Deficits are not irrelevant, but they are a very secondary issue. After we’ve reined in the looting, we can discuss which is the least painful way to submit to the remaining spending.

Our motto should not be “Lower the deficits,” but “Lower the blood-letting.” Not, “Take more blood–but from my leg not my arm,” but “Take less blood.”

What is needed is an immediate 15 percent across-the-board cut in looting. Then another 15 percent the next year. After that, we can talk about deficits, if we even need to.